Lots of books, and we haven’t read them (yet.) Crispin’s reviews alone make interesting points and raise good questions. First, what does children’s height have to do with intersex? Lots, and Crispin sums up the connection in one pithy sentence:

We have always gone to extremes to occupy some sort of physical middle ground.

Oddly, despite the book’s subtitle, Crispin doesn’t discuss how Normal at Any Cost covers the issue of short boys. However, Debbie has been reading Our Daily Meds by Melody Peterson (watch for a review here soon), and Peterson does talk about this issue:

Iowa doctors sometimes referred their young patients to a nonprofit group called the Magic Foundation, which was started by mothers with children with rare growth disorders in 1989. Over the years, the foundation had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars form the companies selling prescription growth hormone products. In a campaign in the early 1990s, the Magic Foundation, as well as another group, the Human Growth Foundation, had measured the height of children in public schools. The screeners suggested that the shortest children visit their doctors for medical treatment. …

A story published in the foundation’s glossy magazine in 2005 was entitled “Me and My Growth Hormone.” The story began, “I was short. My little sister was taller than me. Kids at school picked on me and called me names.” The tale continued with the child getting growth hormone injections and growing so much his pants got too short. “I’m almost grown now,” the story ended. “I’m in the normal range on the growth chart. Growth hormone is like a miracle drug.”

Here’s Crispin on tall girls:

In the mid-20th century, doctors discovered they could control excessive height in girls medicinally, as opposed to the previous method of breaking and surgically removing sections of the leg bones. … If girls were brought into an accelerated puberty with high doses of hormones, they would stop growing earlier and shave off a few inches from their potential height….

Girls were loaded up with DES, short for diethylstilbestrol — a synthetic estrogen primarily prescribed to pregnant women to help prevent miscarriages. Unfortunately for the pregnant women, and the girls who were too tall, DES had a bevy of side effects: vaginal cancer, breast cancer, sterility, blood clots, increased rates of miscarriage, and depression. (The babies in utero were not spared: Many of the girls developed problems like T-shaped uteri, sterility, and vaginal and cervical cancer.)

We’ve known for decades about DES and pregnant women, and the next-generation girls who died from those treatments to their mothers. We didn’t know until now that the drug had other, less justifiable and equally dire, uses. It isn’t clear from these excerpts if tall girls are still getting hormone therapy, but a quick web search seems to imply that the practice has been so frequently revealed to be dangerous to the girls that we can hope it is no longer widely practiced.

And here’s Crispin on intersex surgeries:

Doctors and parents think they are sparing children embarrassment and pain. But now intersex activists are fighting to create a new protocol, one that waits until the child can participate in “hir” (forgive me — I know the pronoun is a clumsy compromise, but one that comes up a lot when you start reading about gender theory) own treatment.

… surgery that is mostly cosmetic is still performed on infants — despite the fact that it usually requires follow-up surgery, that puberty will alter the appearance of genitalia anyway, and that it can elimination sensation or even make arousal painful means — that this is an issue beyond functionality or health alone.

“The debates over when to perform surgery and how best to decide gender assignment obscures the fact that in trying to make infants with intersex diagnoses ‘normal’ boys and girls, physicians and parents are necessarily drawing on cultural ideas about what constitutes male and female.” That includes assigning sex by guessing future sexual orientation in the hopes of avoiding any homosexuality.

The pressures on us as individuals, and especially as parents, to do what ever we can to move toward “normality,” (always a slippery concept and most frequently a divisive and nasty one) are enormous. Some of the most tragic mistakes are made “for the sake of the children.” Every parent wants their children to be healthy, happy, and successful: it’s incredibly easy to transfer this protective motivation into dubious or inappropriate choices. The pharmaceutical companies, the doctors, the media, and often our families and friends are arrayed on the side of this middle ground. Holding our own, accepting ourselves as we are and our children as they are born, dividing medical necessity from cosmetic panic, embracing variety: these things are difficult.

Crispin buries one clue to what makes them so difficult in her comments on Orbach’s Bodies:

One wishes she offered an action plan for women on how to navigate such a toxic environment with confidence. She has been writing about this issue for years, publishing her monumental book Fat Is a Feminist Issue in 1978 — surely she has some tips by now.

This is a terrifying statement. In Fat Is a Feminist Issue more than 30 years ago, Orbach laid out exactly such an action plan. She was one of the first to do so, she has hardly been the last. We can find these action plans in Our Bodies, Ourselves and all the spin-off books. We can find them in almost any size acceptance book, or blog (including this one). We can find them wherever feminists gather, wherever feminists write, wherever feminists talk. Our voices aren’t as strong as the “normality” crowd, and we don’t have as much money–but we still have the power to move even the multibillion-dollar beauty industry, as in Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which is not only popular but has many imitators.

Crispin herself makes one of the key points: “If we want to raise happy, healthy daughters, it would seem we have to start with ourselves.” That the well-read careful thinker Crispin knows so much about this issue and is still looking for such roadmaps tells us not how hard they are to find, but how hard they are to remember and hang onto.

5 thoughts on “The High Cost of “Normal”: Children’s Height, Intersex, and Other Pressures”

In Australia, at least, the tall girls treatment continued into the mid-1970s. I hope that the increasing number of professional female athletes (or, more likely, models) will forever end this particular problem. Short boys and extremely short girls, however, are still receiving treatment. I hold out little hope for body shape being normalised when one end of the height spectrum is still reviled.

Laurie and Debbie, I think your final sentence crystalizes the problem:

“That the well-read careful thinker Crispin knows so much about this issue and is still looking for such roadmaps tells us not how hard they are to find, but how hard they are to remember and hang onto.”

When we try to undo a fundamental belief that has a mass hallucinogenic grip on the media, it takes a heroic amount of self-administered deprogramming even to entertain a different view. Careful thinkers are not immune to mass prejudices, and the only reinforcement you will get for even considering a view so far away from the accepted view is the reward that comes from espousing a view that coincides with reality as it is lived, as opposed to a view that has been and is continually battered into you.

A gay friend of mine put it very well, “I’ve stopped watching television because it continually tells me that black is white.” He might have added, “and life is too short to keep listening to that.”

How bizarre what people would put themselves thru. Have you seen this site which sets out to address the idea that most women have only the mass media to tell them what their and normal breasts look like? http://www.007b.com/breast_gallery.php